the extent of God's gifts to us.

This is certainly crucial in the dramatic and even life-threatening

circumstances of an epidemic. However, most of us in this room will never treat an Ebola
patient, will never be faced with the risks of an epidemic. What then are we to make of our
present professional circumstances, and how do we bring our faith to bear on them?
In the present day and age, and in our country, there is no question that changes in medicine are
occurring, and barreling down on us at top speed. There are plenty of overarching
macroeconomic forces unsettling doctors—a sluggish economy, uncertainty about the impact of
the Affordable Care Act, and the rise of narrow provider networks, just to name a few. But as we
noted at the beginning, these big picture stressors often take a backseat to the everyday
headaches that fill a physician's long days. We are pressured to overschedule in the face of more
complicated clinical care and patients that tend to be older and sicker. Monitoring and
documenting care has become more complex, as a result of increased regulation, quality
indicators, meaningful use, medical home criteria, and other requirements. It is not just about
doing the right thing for your patients. It is about proving to someone else that you have done the
right thing. And as we have already noted, at the top of this list are the roles of the EMR or the
EHR—does it bother anybody else that they cannot even seem to settle on a name for these
electronic records? Is it any wonder that 40 percent of physicians now admit to experiencing
symptoms of burnout.
Other studies have linked stress and burnout complaints directly to the level of EMR functions
required in the workplace (Babbott et al. 2014). As the required time for documentation increases, less
time is available to spend directly with the patient. This is exactly the wrong response, this is
what we cannot allow to occur. If we allow these circumstances, these objects, to distance us
from our patients, we will begin to depersonalize them, reducing them to data entry into our
computers. How do we remind ourselves of how wrong this is, how it fails to fulfill the promises
we made on entry into the profession? There are many ways that we can bring ourselves up
short, to bring a brief halt to that runaway train that threatens to become our professional life. I
know colleagues who stopped at the door of the patient room each time before they enter, and
say a brief prayer. Especially when pressed for time and dealing with a difficult patient or family,
I have found it helpful to remind myself who we are really serving. The ancient Greeks and
Romans loved fables where the gods descended to visit mankind in disguise. This would reveal
the character of those they visited, because they always appeared as the old, the frail, the poor, or
the vulnerable. Those who treated them with courtesy and respect were rewarded accordingly. So
were those who treated them with disdain and disregard. We have no such fables in our
Scriptures—we have something more powerful and potentially more frightening. We have Christ
telling us that however we treat the least of our brethren, we are treating Him. Imagining that
presence in our examining room would make it hard to pay more attention to a computer screen.
This does not resolve all the issues with the EHR, of course. I am neither a computer expert nor a
time management expert—those who are have suggested various solutions, some more feasible
than others: these include completing the record later, involving the patient in entering and
evaluating items on the screen, and positioning the computer so that you do not divert your eyes
from the patient or turn your back to her or him. Some practices have been able to employ
scribes to do the computer entry while the physician takes care of the patient. DragonWare, or
other dictated computer entry devices, can also serve a useful function for some.
In the final analysis, these are just tools to deal with the problems presented by other tools, i.e.,
technology. They will not solve the most fundamental challenges to the profession; these
answers must be